


bitter oranges

by CallicoKitten



Series: whatever our souls are made of [4]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Aftermath, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Childhood, Daemons, Gen, General insanity, Pre-Canon, Psychological Torture, Silva has issues, Torture, but what would you expect from a story about Silva, mentions of noncon, this makes little sense but oh wel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:40:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallicoKitten/pseuds/CallicoKitten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silva is quick and bright and shiny. His daemon is a hyena who laughs and drools.</p><p>Tiago is sly and clever and shrewd. His daemon is a wall lizard who whispers and watches.</p><p>There really is no resemblance between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bitter oranges

**Author's Note:**

> this one is short so i might revisit it.
> 
> unbeta'd, makes little sense and possibly incoherent. 
> 
> enjoy? mebe.

Maricela means bitter.

Later he'll wonder if his parent's daemons knew or if, perhaps, they just liked the way it sounded. 

He figures it doesn't matter much anymore.

*****

Silva is quick and bright and shiny. His daemon is a hyena who laughs and drools.

Tiago is sly and clever and shrewd. His daemon is a wall lizard who whispers and watches.

There really is no resemblance between them.

*****

Maricela settles the day mama dies. 

The day he becomes an orphan.

It isn't something that comes as a surprise, she's been ill for a while. Mari sits on the wall above her bed and Tiago sits beside her bed and holds her limp hand between his while the priest whispers above her and her cat daemon yowls pitifully. His aunt stands against the far wall crossing herself every time his mama utters a ragged cough. The rosary on his mother's wrist is cold against her fevered skin.

Tiago would rather be playing outside in the hot Spanish summer but this is where mama needs him. 

He raises a glass of orange juice to her cracked lips.

He swings his legs and waits.

She dies with a sigh and Mari scampers down the wall as a brightly coloured lizard and never changes again.

*****

The cyanide burns and he thinks he's dying.

It tears through every inch of him and his bones collapse and melt together as his skin boils and his inside burns. He thinks it tears through his thoughts, scrambles them and knocks them loose.

(Maricela is somewhere else, somewhere near because he thinks he can hear her screaming.

Or maybe that's just him.)

*****

He meets M in London.

He's drifting, he lives in the shadows. It suits him, he thinks. 

Mari on his shoulder points her out, "Her daemon isn't with her."

"Sure?" He whispers.

Mari gives him this _look_ that clearly suggests he needs to question his sanity and he grins. They tail M for a few streets before she notices them. She manages to double back and surprise him by stepping out of an alleyway in front of him.

"Why are you following me, boy?" She asks calmly.

Tiago shrugs and Mari speaks for him, "Your daemon isn't with you." She says and M looks vaguely amused to be spoken to directly by a daemon. "We wanted to know why."

She quirks an eyebrow. "And you thought following me would yield results?"

*****

He sees the way Gareth Mallory's daemon is just a little too subdued at his side, the way he always seems to be unconsciously reaching for her. No one else has noticed or if they have they would not understand.

He wonders if his wolf hound screamed when they cut her away.

He wonders if the blade went the whole way down.

He wonders if Mallory and his daemon are a mangled whole or two separate beings.

*****

When he gets caught, yanked out of his safe house and bundled in to a van and then a cell (someone is holding Mari, _someone is holding his daemon_ ) and he screams because this can't be right.

M wouldn't let this happen.

 _They'll find us,_ Mari whispers. _She'll come for us_.

*****

He separates himself into Before and After. 

After they cut Maricela away, Before they striped away every last inch of his humanity and left only the burning, roiling rage that shook his bones and made his head spin. After M, M who promised to look after him (he shouldn't have hacked the Chinese, Mari had said as much) had abandoned him, Before the cyanide melted his face and mind and left him writhing and screaming and pleading _pleasepleaseplease just let me die_ but no, life clung to him and he awoke deformed and diseased but _alive._

It's not long before he gives After a name. 

_Silva._

It's not long before he neatly files away Before in a small box in his mind.

*****

Maricela's laughter is too high pitched, too unhinged and he repulsed and excited at the same time. "They left us to rot," she giggles. "They left us to _die._ " her jaw goes slack, she rolls to face him. "I want to tear him apart," she cackles. "I want to watch M die."

He curls a hand too tightly into his daemon's fur, "So you shall, my dear. So you shall."

And he means it.

*****

Silva doesn't care much for Severine, oh, she's a pretty little thing and he thinks Tiago would have liked (in as much as Tiago _liked_ anyone) but Maricela likes the way her daemon screams when she pulls out her feathers so he puts up with her.

He finds her in a brothel (Tiago would have laughed, he never needed to _pay_ for sex but Silva knows that brothel girls are more likely to indulge his every whim and much, _much_ easier to disappear.) 

The first time he holds her daemon down and clips his wings she throws up.

By the third time she simply sits, hands white-knuckled balled in the sheets.

When he shoots her Mari crushes the bird between her jaws and he wishes he could feel his daemon's mirth.

*****

He gets a job and M calls him a prodigy. 

Calls him a wonder.

Calls him son.

She wears perfume sometimes.

(Perfume that smells like oranges)

He's head of Section H.

He has everything he could ever want.

He almost reaches double-oh status.

(Almost.)

*****

Tiago screams in that dank room they keep him in. He screams until his throat is raw and bloody.

But he doesn't talk.

He won't, he won't, he _won't_.

They keep Mari away from him (he can feel her somewhere out there) they keep her away until a man with a cheetah daemon stalks in with Mari clamped in the cheetah's jaws. He's seen this man before. This man likes to whisper - _no one's coming, they don't care, they gave you up, they're never coming for you._

_she traded you away, she didn't even think twice._

No. It can't be. He refuses to believe it.

But it's been five months and they might (must) be right.

They put a glass of orange juice in his cell. 

It's all they ever give him.

He takes the pill.

*****

He's thirteen when his grandmother's island gets infested, overrun. 

She uses it grow orange trees and Tiago has spent many a summer picking them and licking the sweet, tangy juice from his fingers. The year the rats come the oranges don't taste so sweet anymore. 

She builds the trap and they wait together, her cat daemon (just like mama's) sits with her tail swinging like a pendulum. 

She shows him the bloodied drum, full of half-eaten, half-mauled, dying, dead, squealing, scratching, gnawing, rats. _Chaos_ , he thinks. The stench of blood and death reaches his nose and he bulks, pales, holds back a retch. 

His grandmother laughs and claps him on the back, "They are just rats, Tiago. They do not mean anything to anyone, all they know is the drive to live, to survive."

There are two rats atop the corpses of the others. 

_Winners,_ Mari hisses. 

It's a hollow victory, Tiago thinks. Bathed in blood and driven mad by pain. 

"But they're alive," Mari reminds him, her scales are cool beneath his fingers. "And isn't that point of all this? To survive?"

"I suppose," Tiago says.

Oranges don't taste right anymore.

They're bitter, infused with the scent of blood.

*****

Mari changes when they cut her away.

He _feels_ it.

They're in the mesh cages and the man with the cheetah daemon has the blade that will _destroy_ him and Tiago has never begged, not once in his life but now he can't stop.   
"Pleasepleaseplease! Don't, oh please, just _don't_!" In Spanish and English and mandarin and a mangled version of all three. "Just _don't_. Just _please_!" 

Mari is silent, stoic, sat in her cage, tongue flickering out calmly. 

_It'll be alright,_ she says through their bond. _We'll be alright._

The blade goes down between them and there's nothing.

(Mari screams, high and hollow and _terrifying_ )

Nothing but whitehotburningpain and wrongwrongwrong and MariMariMariMari.

The last thing he feels is the change.

(Her scales cracking and breaking and reforming as fur, bursting out and bones breaking and lengthening and teeth and slathering jaws.)

Her high pitched laughter cuts through the pain.

 _Hyena,_ he thinks blearily.

There's no answer from Mari, he reaches for her in his head but there's nothing but a raw absence (and then his laughter is joining hers in the cold Chinese prison room.)

*****

Daemons can change after extremely traumatic events, Silva knows this well. It's one of those things people don't like to admit. 

He supposes separation is about as traumatic as it gets.

*****

Bond flinches when Mari slinks in beside him and Silva laughs.

(A _dog_ , Mari says, how _dull_.

Silva touches her fur, Maybe he'll surprise us.)

And _oh,_ how he does.

*****

_M, M, M,_ his heart beats in tandem. _M, M, M._

"We'll tear her," Mari hisses in chains on the helicopter. "We'll make her _scream_."

Bond's dog is watching them stoically, the pretty girl's tarantula hawk daemon on her nose. Mari snaps and snarls and growls at them but neither one flinches. 

_M, M, M._

We're coming home, mummy.

*****

The Chinese dump him on a street in some nameless village. 

They dump Mari elsewhere.

Silva laughs, "You think I can't find her? You're even stupider than I first thought!"

The agent gives him an almost pitying look before driving off, one hand wound in his otter daemon's fur. They don't understand, none of them do. 

They might be two separate beings now but they're still one, will _always_ be one. 

He finds her after two weeks, her fur is filthy, marred with scars, her tongue lolls out between razor-teeth and she is quick to snarl, quick to giggle. He touches her coarse fur, winds one hand through it, "Oh, _Mari_ , you're perfect."

She snarls, it ripples through her and he feels her raw power with a sudden thrill. "Of _course_ I am."

*****

The blade thunks in to his back and the gun falls from his hand.

He turns and staggers.

Mari is giggling, gold dust falling from her fur as she shudders with laughter. 

Bond stands watching with calm disinterest, his dog by his side, her tail swishing slowly on the floor. "Last rat standing," Bond says.

(There's a taste like bitter oranges in his mouth.)

Mari explodes in to a cloud of gold beside him, absurdly beautiful.

He falls forward.


End file.
